Check if File is Empty in Python

Python – Check if file is empty

To check if a file is empty or not in Python, you can use the os.path library. Import os library, get the file size using os.path.getsize() function and check if the size is zero or not.

Empty file must have a size of zero bytes.

The syntax of the boolean expression to check if the file is empty is

os.path.getsize('path/to/file') == 0

The above expression returns a boolean value of True if the file is empty, or False if the file is not empty.

Note: The 'path/to/file' in the above expression should be replaced with the actual path of the file you want to check.

Example

In the following program, we check programmatically if the file myfolder/sample.txt is empty or not.

File

We use the above boolean expression, to check if the file is empty or not, as a condition in the if-else statement.

import os

path_to_file = "myfolder/sample.txt"

if os.path.getsize(path_to_file) == 0:
    print("File is empty.")
else:
    print("File is not empty.")

Output

File is empty.

Summary

In this tutorial of Python Examples, we learned how to check if a file is empty or not by checking if the file size is zero or not.